Max Schireson

Residence: I am a Cal guy living on the Stanford campus, where my wife is on the faculty.

Max Schireson was a Bay Area wunderkind who went to UC Berkeley at age 15 to study math, but got sidetracked by computers and left before graduating. In 2011, he joined MongoDB, a Palo Alto/New York City-based startup that sells services to companies around open source database software it created, and in 2013 he became CEO. Founded in 2007, the company competes with the likes of Oracle Corp. and is seeking to upend the database world. Schireson arrived from MarkLogic, another database company, where he rose to COO after nearly eight years. Since then, MongoDB has raised $220 million on top of an earlier $11.4 million; the number of employees jumped from just over 20 to about 400; and the number of customers has surged from a couple of dozen to more than 1,000.

Business strategy

Biggest challenge for your business: Competing with companies hundreds of times bigger, like Oracle. You can be sure they have got more salespeople and more of a marketing budget than we do.

Company goal yet to be achieved: We want to build an ecosystem so people can use this technology because it’s the right tool for the job.

How will you know that you’ve achieved it: We will have the market share we deserve. My guess is something like two-thirds of the applications being built today would be a better fit in MongoDB.

Management philosophy

Guiding principles for good management: A manager is responsible for building a really strong team.

Best way to keep competitive edge: Staying close to customers and their requirements.

Why people like working for you: I did a good job of putting the team together.

Why people don’t like working for you: Sometimes, I don’t have a long attention span. Taking out a phone in the middle of a meeting, or moving on to the next topic, that drives people crazy. I try to keep my phone face down in a meeting.

Judgment calls

Best business decision: The strategy we’re following with MongoDB, opening up the technology and trying to make it ubiquitous. That is the key to our future success.

Hardest lesson learned and how you learned it: The future is going to be a mix of SaaS (software-as-a-service) and open source. It became apparent in the seven years I was at MarkLogic. It wasn’t that it wasn’t a good technology and a good team. It just felt like fighting an uphill battle. There is so much more momentum due to open source. People add onto the technology. We can build our integration to make MongoDB work well for 10 different languages, the rest of the world makes it work for another 30. Those contributions to the technology help it to mature and develop more quickly.

Toughest business decision: The hardest decisions are about people. When is the person who was great at doing this role in this phase of the company not the right person to do that same role in the next phase?

Biggest missed opportunity: My liquid bank balance would be higher if I had gone to Salesforce with Marc in the early, early days. That said, I’m really glad that I didn’t, because I found my path here. I think we’ll wind up really revolutionizing the database industry.

True confessions

Like best about job: The fact that I am really having an impact, enabling the next generation of applications.

Like least about job: If it was up to me, I would still be anonymous and no one would know or care what kind of car I drove.

Pet peeve: People who just do things on autopilot and aren’t thinking about why they are doing what they are doing.

Most respected competitor: Oracle. I was there for nine years. Larry (Ellison) is very smart, very creative, very driven. The company has enormous global presence, and a very deep footprint in their customer base. I don’t think they’ll be easy to disrupt.